Multiple criteria supplier selection: a fuzzy approach

A company must purchase a lot of diverse components and raw materials from different upstream suppliers to manufacture or assemble its products. However, it is not only a very complicated and perplexing task to select outstanding suppliers for decision‐makers of strategic purchasing, but also it involves uncertainty and produces erroneous results while considering single criteria. For this reason, the decision‐makers of strategic purchasing greatly require an efficient, valid and fair tool to assist them in selecting appropriate suppliers forthwith. This paper proposes a supplier selection model for any kind of company by using MATLAB fuzzy logic toolbox to help the purchasing department in selecting the most appropriate supplier. The main task in the proposed model involves determining the numerical score for different suppliers considering their respective performance in various qualitative and quantitative evaluation criteria and then selecting the best supplier having highest score. Fuzzy control is used to determine the best supplier by calculating the score in selected evaluation criteria which are provided in numerical values for the convenience of calculation.